From Deadbeat noble to Top Rank Swordsman
Chapter 67: Shattered Banners

Chapter 67: Shattered Banners

The snow had ceased.

Not because the storm had passed, but because the sky held its breath.

Leon stood on the south wall, watching the procession draw nearer. Nine coffins, carried on black palanquins by figures cloaked in silence. No drumbeat. No chant. Just the crunch of frost beneath deliberate steps.

Kellen joined him, gaze fixed. "You’re certain that crest was yours?"

Leon didn’t answer immediately. His eyes were locked on the lead coffin’s wrappings. The silver thread didn’t lie.

"Yes."

Eliane stepped beside them, her cloak still dusted with ash. "Then they’re not bluffing anymore."

Marien arrived last, helm under her arm, her brow knit tight. "We brought the battle to their blades. Now they want to bring it to our blood."

Leon turned from the parapet. "Call the inner ring to muster. All command ranks. And ready a chamber. We hold council within the hour."

As they moved, the fortress felt different. Quieter. Not from fatigue, but from weight. The kind that settled before history bent.

In the war room, the flames burned low. Officers, mages, scouts—all gathered under the cracked sigil of the Accord.

Leon faced them with a calm not born of peace, but clarity.

"They’ve stolen the Archive," he began. "They’ve raised the dead. And now, they bring symbols of the first war to our gates."

Kellen leaned forward. "What does it mean?"

"It means they want us to believe the past is theirs," Leon said. "That even the foundations of our oaths are poison. But it also means they’re afraid."

Eliane raised a brow. "Afraid of what?"

Leon looked down at his blade, the second one—forged in silence, pulsing faint.

"Afraid we’ll remember what the Accord truly was."

The silence that followed was not uncertain.

It was resolve.

"Send envoys," Leon said. "To the deep libraries, to the border sanctums, to the last of the Witnessed."

Marien frowned. "The Witnessed are fractured. Half have gone silent."

"Then find the ones who haven’t. We need testimony. We need the truth."

Kellen crossed his arms. "And the coffins?"

Leon met his gaze.

"We open them."

A murmur spread through the chamber.

"They were sent for theatre," Eliane said. "Opening them’s what they want."

"No," Leon said. "They want us afraid of what lies inside. That’s not the same."

Later, under torchlight, they gathered in the great courtyard. Snow lay thin across the stone. The nine coffins had been laid in a crescent, each untouched, save for the sigils on their coverings.

Leon stepped to the first, breath held.

He pulled back the shroud.

The figure within wore robes of an ancient scribe. His throat had been slit. His lips sewn shut.

Beside him, the second coffin held a knight of House Mallorin. Cracked helm. Eyes open. A message carved into his breastplate.

"False Accord."

Each coffin after told its own tale. Fallen scholars. Murdered nobles. Betrayed commanders.

And in the ninth—a mirror.

Leon saw his own face in its reflection. But the carving below said only:

"The Last Witness."

He stepped back, heart thunderous.

The Council hadn’t just stolen the past.

They were declaring the future.

And Leon, whether he wanted it or not, had become its reckoner.

A low murmur ran through the courtyard as the gathered command ranks absorbed what they’d seen. Some turned away, others stared in numb silence—but all understood what the Council had done. This wasn’t intimidation. It was prophecy. Fabricated, painted in blood, and delivered like scripture.

Leon didn’t flinch. He stood before the ninth coffin, fists clenched, until the last whisper died.

Then he spoke—clear, without ceremony.

"Burn them."

Gasps rang out. Even Marien hesitated.

Eliane stepped forward. "Leon—"

"No graves. No markers. No relics. They tried to turn them into symbols. We deny them that."

He looked to the pyre builders already arriving from the forge wing. "Build the fire high. Let the whole field see it burn."

It took hours, but by dusk, the flames roared against the darkening sky. The nine coffins were consumed in silence. No chants. No rites. Only fire.

As the smoke coiled into the clouds, Kellen leaned toward Leon. "You know they’ll call this desecration."

Leon’s eyes didn’t leave the blaze. "Let them. Their dead don’t get to speak for the living."

By midnight, the embers still glowed in the courtyard, but the fortress was stirring again. A different energy now—not rage, not grief, but motion. Quiet, swift, focused.

The scouts had already been dispatched. One to the Witnesses of Caer Durell, another to the Silent Towers in the north. Riders carried coded dispatches marked with sigils unseen since the founding days. Leon had unearthed them himself from a sealed reliquary in the armory archives.

Down in the Vault of Oaths, Eliane stood before a wall none had touched in over sixty years. A wall etched with names and blood. The Founders’ Signum. Her torchlight played across the carvings as she reached for the oldest layer.

"Leon," she called softly.

He stepped beside her, eyes scanning the surface.

There it was.

The twelfth name.

Elberyn.

The same as the revenant.

Leon reached out, brushing the stone.

"This is why they opened the vault," Eliane whispered. "Not to summon him... but to erase him."

Leon stared at the name.

"No. To remind me of him."

Eliane looked at him sharply. "You knew?"

"My father once told me Elberyn blood ran in our line. Distant. Forgotten. But not gone."

Eliane’s voice dropped. "Then the revenant wasn’t just a warning. He was... family."

Leon nodded slowly.

"And if the Council is rewriting the past, then we use what they forgot."

He turned to the wall and placed his palm against the etched sigil. The stone shimmered faintly—responding.

"Buried blood still answers," Leon said. "That’s their mistake."

As the glyph glowed, a narrow seam appeared beneath the names. A drawer, previously hidden, eased outward.

Inside—parchments, bone-tipped keys, and a single crest ring older than any in living memory.

Eliane stared.

"What is it?"

Leon picked up the ring. The metal was warm.

"It’s our next move."

And in the distance, under the shroud of early snow, war drums began again—this time from a different front.

The Council wasn’t the only one stirring ancient ghosts.

Leon turned the ring in his hand, feeling its weight settle into his palm like a verdict. The crest—an ouroboros wreathed in flame—was older than any house still sworn to the Accord. Older even than the Great Founding.

"It belonged to the Pale Envoy," he murmured.

Eliane blinked. "That’s a myth."

"No," Leon replied. "He was real. My father said the Envoy served as a neutral witness during the Accord’s first drafting. Neither bound nor beholden. A safeguard between realms."

He traced the ring’s edge. "But his records vanished. Scrubbed, like Elberyn."

Eliane stepped closer. "If that ring survived... then maybe the Envoy’s hall did too."

Leon looked up. "Then we find it."

The next morning, before even the garrison stirred, Leon assembled a small team—Eliane, Kellen, and two silent wardens from the Outer Archive. They departed on horseback through the lower eastern trail, skirting the blood-soaked plains now guarded by rotating watchfires.

Their destination lay deep in the Vale Below, a forbidden swathe of forest where old oaths were once inked in sap and steel. The place had been sealed off for generations, dismissed as cursed land. But curses, Leon knew now, were just stories kept alive by fear—and silence.

They reached the edge by nightfall.

The Vale stood untouched, thick with blackroot trees and low, whispering fog. Even animals kept their distance. No birdcall, no insects. Just wind moving through bark like breath through old lungs.

"We’re being watched," Kellen said softly.

Leon dismounted. "Good. It means we’re close."

He drew the second blade, its pulse steady—stronger now, reacting to the presence of something ancient.

Eliane gestured toward a break in the thicket. "There. Stonework beneath the ivy."

They moved together, cutting through brush, until they stood before a half-collapsed archway. In its centre was a relief of the ouroboros. Leon stepped forward and held out the ring.

The carving flared.

Stone shifted.

And the ground trembled as a stairwell opened beneath their feet, spiraling down into the earth.

Torches lit themselves along the walls as they descended. Dust floated like ash in the glow. No spiderwebs. No decay. Just silence, preserved by forgotten wards.

At the base, they found it: a round chamber, domed with golden inlays, lined with twelve obsidian pillars. Each pillar bore a symbol—one for every founder.

And in the centre, a basin of liquid memory, silver and still.

Eliane gasped. "A Truthwell."

Leon nodded. "Only one person may draw from it at a time."

He stepped to the edge and lowered his fingers.

The moment he touched the surface, it rippled—and then bloomed.

Visions exploded across the chamber walls. Not dreams. Not illusions. History.

The First Accord signed in stormlight. The betrayal of Elberyn not as treason, but as refusal—his rejection of the Council’s rising grip. The Pale Envoy standing silent as lines were redrawn in blood. And the original Archive, forged not in ink, but bound in memory inside the Well.

Leon staggered back, gasping.

Kellen caught him.

"They twisted everything," Leon said. "Every record. Every oath. Every grave."

He turned to the others. "But the Well remembers."

He straightened, fire in his chest now, not fear. "We bring them proof. Not of what they are. But what they were."

And above them, far from the sanctum below, a fresh snowfall began—slow, gentle, and untainted—for the first time in years.

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